Famililism and Welfare Regimes: Poverty, Employment, and Family Policies
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A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Misra, Joya; Moller, Stephanie Working Paper Famililism and welfare regimes: Poverty, employment, and family policies LIS Working Paper Series, No. 399 Provided in Cooperation with: Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Suggested Citation: Misra, Joya; Moller, Stephanie (2005) : Famililism and welfare regimes: Poverty, employment, and family policies, LIS Working Paper Series, No. 399, Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), Luxembourg This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/95502 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. 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She has recently published papers in Social Problems, the Annual Review of Sociology, Socio-Economic Review, and Research in Political Sociology. Her current research includes an analysis of the effects of family policy in explaining the motherhood wage gap in a variety of countries, and a comparative project on immigration, welfare state restructuring, and the international division of care. Stephanie Moller is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She has recently published "Supporting Poor Single Mothers: Gender and Race in the US Welfare State (Gender and Society, 16, no. 4, 2002) and coauthored "Determinants of Poverty in Advanced Capitalist Democracies" (American Sociological Review, 68, no. 1, 2003). Her current research examines state-level determinants of stratification. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2003 annual meetings of the Social Science Historical Association, and in the 2003-2004 Center for Public Policy and Administration Colloquium Series. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant #SES-0095251, the Social and Demographic Research Institute, and the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Thanks to assistance provided by Jessica Cichalski, Karen Mason, and Sabine Merz. We appreciate helpful comments from many scholars, particularly, Eric Einhorn, Nancy Folbre, Barbara Hobson, Ann Orloff, and Dylan Riley. Familialism and Welfare Regimes: Poverty, Employment, and Family Policies Abstract While many nations lay a claim to supporting “family values,” these values may be interpreted in a variety of ways. How do nations support families, particularly families with children? What strategies do different nations take, and how do these strategies lead to different outcomes? In this paper, we show how different combinations of policies that support family caregiving and those that de-familialize caregiving lead to significantly different outcomes. We show that nations with stronger levels of both kinds of policies have lower poverty levels than those with weaker levels of these policies, but that strong levels of policies that support family caregiving and weak levels of de-familializing policies have more varied results, with higher levels of poverty, particularly for families headed by single mothers. In addition, this research illustrates significant variation among “continental Conservative” countries, and suggests the importance of a less static approach to welfare state regimes, which also fully recognizes the centrality of gender relations to labor market and welfare state policies. 2 Familialism and Welfare Regimes: Poverty, Employment, and Family Policies Over the last several decades, advanced industrialized countries have changed in notable ways: welfare states have undergone restructuring, women have entered the labor force in growing numbers, and family forms have experienced serious alterations. A critical array of family policies has played a key role in addressing these changes and has helped balance the needs of families with the operation of both states and markets. For example, effective family policies may address families’ needs by substantially lowering poverty rates for families with children, and in particular for single parent families (Bradshaw et al. 1993; Folbre 1994; McLanahan and Garfinkel 1995; Rainwater and Smeeding 2003). Family policies may also impact the family-market nexus by shaping whether women primarily pursue employment or remain in the home and provide caretaking for their families when children are young (Folbre 1994; Gornick and Meyers 2003). As O’Connor, Orloff, and Shaver (1999, p. 1) argue, Debates about the proper role of the state vis-à-vis the market and family and about the character of state policies have intensified and broadened out to consider a greater range of policy alternatives. Concerns of gender pervade these social policy debates – about employment opportunities and day care, about how (and even whether) to publicly support caregiving work and single parent families, about the scope of women’s choices as to whether and when to be mothers. In this study, we explore the strategies that nations take to support families, and how these strategies lead to different outcomes, particularly regarding poverty and employment, for both single and married mothers. We explore how the intersection of familialistic policies (supporting family caretaking) and de-familializing policies (undermining family caretaking) leads to different constellations of policies, and how these constellations reflect and lead to different levels of women’s labor force participation. By relating poverty rates for a variety of families – including married and single, childless, with children, and with young children – we assess the effectiveness of these policies regarding poverty prevention. In addition, we analyze how these policies impact married and single mother families, because single parent families “raise fundamental issues about the balance between family, state, and individual financial responsibilities; and about the roles of men and women as parents and workers” (Millar 1996, p. 25). In addition, our analysis reconsiders the welfare regime approach, and how, in particular, the “continental European Conservative” regime, which is said to be particularly familialistic, operates as a policy strategy. Here, we focus upon Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. We show that there are important variations among these nations, and that these differences may point to a more dynamic model of welfare state regimes. While the welfare regime concept has led to very powerful and effective analyses of welfare states, this concept assumes that welfare states hold a fixed position over time. Yet with the dramatic changes in gender relations, welfare state policies have changed in substantial ways, leading to substantial variations within regime type. A model that better captures these transformations would be preferable. This article begins with a discussion of the welfare regime concept and, in particular, critiques focused on familialism and de-familialization. From there, we place the Conservative continental countries within this theoretical context. Next, we examine how nations cluster regarding poverty rates and women’s labor force participation rates for a variety of family types. We examine some potential explanations for these different clusters, emphasizing the 2 intersection of policies that support and those that destabilize family caregiving. Finally, we draw out the implications of our findings for studies of welfare regimes. Welfare Regimes, Familialism, and De-Familialization For comparativists, welfare state scholars over the last fifteen or so years have focused on explaining differences between “families of nations” (Castles 1993; Castles and Mitchell 1993) and “worlds of welfare capitalism” (Esping-Andersen 1990; Kolberg and Esping-Andersen 1992), showing